Brian Leiter posts on ‘philosopher’s tics’. Very true, very true. I just happen to have buried something similar in a long recent post you probably didn’t read, and just as well. So here it is. It’s from Imre Kertész’ novel – but I fear it’s his autobiography – Kaddish For a Child Not Born. The narrator is at some sort of forest retreat for writers and thinkers, trying to avoid the writers and thinkers. Alas, he is not successful. “The philosopher was nearing me in a pondering mood; I could see it in the slightly inclined pose of his head, on which his rascally visored cap perched; he approached like a humorous highwayman with a few drinks down his gullet, pondering whether to knock me down or content himself with the loot.”
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John Holbo
Americans, of all ages, of all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They are not only commercial or industrial associations in which they all take part but others of a thousand different types – religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very minute … Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention that the intellectual and moral associations in America.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
I stumbled on that passage – appropriate unto the day, for what is declared independence if not a precondition for happier association? – while poking around regarding blogging and social networks and such, following up Henry’s interesting ‘blogosphere as 18th century coffee-house’ post, following up Laura at Apartment 11D’s ‘blogging polis’ post. (I’d tell you who posted that Tocqueville passage, but I’ve forgotten.)
Kieran is blaming himself for the fact that somehow it is still last week around here. Some MT import/export thing. SQL data dump. Makes my head hurt. I just want to point out that there are alternative explanations for the mysterious linkrot, it’s sudden disappearance, and the disappearance of a couple days. And it could have been worse.
“Everyone know that in the run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which – like a sixth smallest toe – grow a thirteenth freak month.
We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot. More tentative than real.
What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days – white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster’s hand, stumps folded into a fist.”
– Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
I’m not saying it was senile, intemperate summer itself that did for a few days of posts. In which case Kieran has just been wasting his time, futzing with computers. I’m not saying that the disappeared days were actually extra days that weren’t on the calendar to begin with, that now the calendar has reasserted itself, that the superfluous temporal … I do not hestitate to say ‘efflorescence’ “lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it.”
I am not saying that comments and track-backs are still being left to these posts we no longer ‘see’ in ‘our’ world. I’m just saying.
I’ll assume you are an educated person who’s already read Josh Marshall’s post about … what to call it? Bush’s Al-Sadrist gambit: locked in a death-struggle with the forces of democratic reconstruction in your country? See if you can get zealous souls to lay down suppressing fire from the holy places. If you succeed, fine. If the holy places end up getting shelled when the targets lose patience, you cry religious persecution (even if it was pure self-defense) and make hay out of that. It’s win-win.
Let’s consider this issue of Bush’s attempt to “nudge the American bishops toward greater ‘activism’.” To wit: denying communion to Catholic political candidates who take church-disapproved stances on gay marriage, abortion and stem cell research.
Another positive-negative rights-liberties post. Probably you’ve had enough of that, so I’ll tuck it away discreetly.
Much good discussion – from our own Henry and Chris, for example – in the wake of Eugene Volokh’s critique of Steve Bainbridge’s TCS piece in praise of negative rights.
It seems to me clear that Eugene is quite correct in the points he makes. But I am left scratching my head, nonetheless, because I teach J.S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin every semester – for two semester’s now. So I think I’ve got my head tolerably wrapped around the whole negative vs. positive liberty thing. (I mean, they sort of turn into each other if you squint, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an important distinction to grapple with.) But it would never occur to me to talk about negative vs. positive rights. That seems to me like argle-bargle. But apparently there are grown-ups who talk this way, even write academic papers this way? (I guess these are the hazards of teaching intro political philosophy without being a specialist and actually reading the scholarly literature. I get blindsided by stuff other people are familiar with. But still. What’s this about, eh? If I’m totally wrong about everything that follows, someone take me to school, please.)
Perhaps you are unaware – but then you should be made aware – that, in addition to releasing one of the best albums of last year, Quebec, Ween has one of the best band websites on the net. Two of them, actually. Lots of free music and videos and goodies. Not to mention 24-hour a day ween radio. Setlists. Links to weird fansites. At some point even my interest starts to wane.
But before that happens to you …
I think Michael Rappaport is straining to find the silver lining in this intelligence cloud.
Consider this an open thread about this important story, with optional special reference to the question: is it a source of consolation if it turns out the whole spy game is usually just seeing how many clowns you can cram into a riddle, wrapped in a question, locked inside an enigma?
Jonah Goldberg wishes liberals were more interested in ideas, specifically the history of their own ideas. He wishes they were less ‘intellectually deracinated’; more like conservatives:
Kieran and co. came to visit. Pictures here.
Or maybe weaseled out of military duty. Naw, that’d be puissant quit-scutage majeur. So I think the following definitely supports John’s point. Maybe.
Never forget that tenure by sochemaunce seisined by feodo copyholds in gross and reseisined through covenants of foeffseignory in frankalpuissance –
The Plain People of Ireland: That sounds like dirty water being squirted out of a hole in a burst rubber ball.
– is alienable only by droit of bonfeasaunce subsisting in free-bench coigny or in re-vested copywrits of seisina faci stipidem, a fair copy bearing a 2d. stamp to be entered at the Court of Star Chamber.
Furthermore, a rent seck indentured with such frankalseignory or chartmoign charges as may be, and re-empted in Mart Overt, subsists thereafter in graund serjaunty du roi, eighteen fishing smacks being deemed sufficient to transport the stuff from Lisbon.
The Plain People of Ireland: Where do the fishing smacks come in?
Myself: Howth, usually.
The Plain People of Ireland: No, but what have they got to do with what you were saying?
Myself: It’s all right. I was only trying to find out whether ye were still reading on. By the way, I came across something very funny the other night in a public house.
The Plain People of Ireland (chuckling): What was it?Myself: It was a notice on the wall. It read: ‘We have come to an arrangement with our bankers. They have agreed not to sell drinks. We, on our part, have agreed not to cash cheques.’
The Plain People of Ireland: O, Ha Ha Ha! Ho Ho Ho! (Sounds of thousands of thighs being slapped in paroxysms of mirth.)
Myself: Good. I knew that would amuse you.1
1 Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien), The Best of Myles
I shouldn’t, but what the heck.
Steven Den Beste has a long post in which he articulates his view that:
we are actually engaged in a three-way war. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important consequence of it is simply the recognition and acknowledgement that it is a three-way struggle.
This is the follow-up to my previous academic literary studies and blogging post. (Memo to self: need snappier handle than ‘academic literary studies blogging’ – but not yet, lest we snap off some corner of the subject prematurely. ‘Bookchat’ not it – since it is vague and probably refers to a thing possibly necessary but hardly sufficient, if you see what I mean.) WARNING: post of interest to few.
I trust you agree with me that advertising is a fascinating subject, for it concerns essentially the nature of the beast. Yet reading its entrails is so tricky. Tonight a passage from David Ogilvy‘s Confessions of an Advertising Man, first published in 1963. In a chapter entitled “Should Advertising Be Abolished?”: